Chapter 48 The Missing Piece
When Kate entered his empty room, the familiar musky scent welcomed her, but she could tell that it was fading away, just like the love bites he had given her.
The laptop that she wanted was placed on the bedside table she walked up to. She took it and sat along with it on the mattress and pressed the power button. It still had the same screensaver of her child hood picture, but unfortunately, it also had something else. A column to type password.
Kate was aware that she was stuck, but she wasn’t going to accept defeat that easily. During her lonely life in the mansion, she had developed a few not-that-important skills and one of them included guessing passwords. She has always emerged successful in guessing the password of her father’s computer, so she thought that she should give this one a try.
“I can do this” she prepped herself up and wet her lips before guessing the password for the first time.
Kate’s fingers fluttered on the keyboard as she typed the first thing that came to her mind.
‘D-O-N-Q-U-I-S-I-T-O’
But that was wrong!
A classic rookie mistake.
“Yep!...too easy...” Kate clicked her tongue and tried again, and this time she used the name ‘Marcus’ along with other characters like numbers and signs, but none of it was right.
At last, she decided to take a wild guess on the password, mostly because she had one more shot at typing the code before the device declared an ‘emergency shutdown’ on her. After taking a minute to contemplate, Kate came up with a new one.
But it wasn’t just a password per se; It was something she wished to come true. Kate bit her lower lip as she typed the last wild guess, her hand slightly trembling on each tab of the keyboard.
‘L-O-V-E-Y-O-U-K-A-T-E’
Her index finger hovered above the ‘Enter’ key with definite assurance of the password being rejected, but still, she took a deep breath and clicked on it.
She squeezed closed her eyes and waited for the laptop to shut down, but instead with a soft ping, the home page appeared on the screen.
Her heart stopped beating for a second, and then it began jumping furiously against her chest. A thousand butterflies swirled around her tummy as she learned the beautiful truth.
‘He loves me.....’
Something hot and wet trickled down her cheeks. Only after touching it with her palm did she realize that she was crying. And she didn’t even know why. Maybe, it was due to the over whelming emotions that she was feeling for the first time in her life. It was impossible for her to even imagine that the Capo of the Italian mafia was in love with her.
When did that even happen?
A knot twisted in her stomach when she recalled the fact that she didn’t even know if he was alive and okay. She swallowed the seed of guilt because she wouldn’t have asked for his death to his face, if she had known that he loved her and had the wish to marry her.
Wiping away the unshed tears from her eyes to clear the blurry vision, Kate began searching the laptop folders and files for his childhood pictures. Thanks to her infamous snooping skills, she managed to find a few hidden icons that were enclosed within the visible ones.
Kate forged through every file until she stumbled upon an icon that named ‘Bits of heart’. Squinting her eyes on the screen, she carefully clicked on it and the tab opened.
The shock of what she saw so strong that she threw the laptop on the mattress and jumped away from it, her hands clasped across her mouth to contain a startled gasp.
‘No no no no no no no....’
Her heart rate picked up as she paced across the room while hugging herself and tried to calm down. Her eyes again darted towards the screen that displayed the photograph of her childhood self playing with a ball, and beside her stood Marcus. His dark hair was slightly curly, his blue orbs piercing and alert. She could make out the outline of a gun beneath his jacket. His entire demeanor was like that of a warrior, prepared to stop even Zeus from laying a finger on her.
Blood roared in her ears as she came to terms with the buried reality;
Marcus was Chris.
And Chris was Don Quisito!
Kate slowly walked back and resumed her initial position on the mattress and reached out with her dainty little fingers to trace the image of Chris. The only possible explanation to how she had missed the resemblance was that the boy that appeared in her dreams had brown eyes a dark brown hair, which were different from that of Marcus’s.
But still, why didn’t Quisito tell her?
A million other questions bubbled up inside her and she had to find out the answers before the sunset because she felt like she would go insane if she doesn’t. To get an explanation to those questions, she had to meet Quisito.
Now the problem was that she didn’t know where he was or whether he would want to meet her. But those weren’t the only things she was concerned about; She didn’t know how to get to him.
Fortunately, Kate knew who exactly does she had to ask in order to reach Quisito.